Associate Artists

James Phillips

James is a writer and director. His first play, The Rubenstein Kiss won the John Whiting Award and TMA Award for Best Play.

Plays include: The White Whale (Slung Low/Leeds) The Rubenstein Kiss (Hampstead); City Stories (St James); Hidden in the Sand (Trafalgar Studios); The Wind in the Willows (Latitude/ Theatre503); Time and the City (Slung Low/Hull); Bobby and the Chimps (Florida); The Little Fir Tree (Sheffield Theatres).

TV credits include: If We Dead Awaken (Channel 4/Touchpaper). His first film script, The Watching Tree, is being produced by Blonde to Black Productions.

His first book of documentary photography, Nicosia: The Last Dividing Line, was published in Cyprus in 2013.

Barney Norris

Barney Norris was born in 1987 and grew up in West Sussex, London and Salisbury. He has been a student at Keble College, Oxford and Royal Holloway, a member of the Royal Court Young Writer's Programme, and a Pierce Loughran Memorial Scholar at the Yeats International Summer School. His award-winning debut play, At First Sight, was published and produced on tour in January 2011.

Barney's plays include Eventide and Visitors (winner of the Critics' Circle and Offwestend Awards for Most Promising Playwright). His first novel, Five Rivers Met On A Wooded Plain, is published by Doubleday.

He is co-artistic director of the Theatre company Up In Arms.

Liz Cooke

Liz studied English at Oxford University and trained in theatre design at the Slade School of Fine Art. She works as an artist, maker, writer and deviser and principally as a stage designer, for companies including the NT, RSC, Royal Court, and in the West End and principal regional theatres.

She has been designing professionally for around fifteen years.

Liz works collaboratively with directors, designers and performers and has designed extensively for physical performance, often incorporating aerial and circus techniques. She has designed frequently for directors such as Kathryn Hunter, on shows from Rebecca Gilman’s The Glory of Living to Pericles at the Globe and Othello for the RSC.

Michael Gabriel

Michael Gabriel has been drawing from live performances at the Oxford Playhouse for over thirty years.

He has made hundreds of quick sketches and paintings of actors, rehearsals, and performance moments.

As an Associate Artist, he continues to draw and exhibit at the Playhouse, and aims to create a body of work celebrating the experience and magic of theatre and the excellence of theatre in Oxford.

Michael's first exhibition of work, Between the Lines, was exhibited throughout the Playhouse in the autumn of 2009 and more recently Michael exhibited work with sculptor Alison Berman during Art Weeks 2010.